Unmasked. Эндрю Ллойд Уэббер

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СКАЧАТЬ if he had decided that those two hours were not my Westminster swansong. But instead of a scowling HM clasping his infamous six foot cane he stood there beaming. A small table had been laid with a decanter and two glasses.

      “I have a small dinner party tonight and I am serving a 1945 Château Léoville Barton,” declared the man the school nicknamed Coote. “I thought you might like to taste it with me.”

      Thus began my friendship with the headmaster. I valued my time with him, even if it did sometimes mean sitting very close to him on his sofa.

5

       “Mr Lloyd Webber, Do You Like Cats?”

      Come 1964 Swinging London was really taking off. I had a bit more freedom at school now. Carnaby Street spewed out “mod” clothes. Beatlemania and Beatle boots lurked everywhere. Even big American pop stars were making desperate attempts to sound hip in Britain. Two Yanks in England was the latest Everly Brothers album offering. Even Bobby Vee experimented with The New Sounds from England, albeit with an occasional Buddy Holly hiccup.

      In January I somehow got a ticket in the cheap seats for the theatrical event of the year – for me perhaps of all time – the opening performance of Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Tosca with Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi. So much has been written about the few legendary performances they gave that all I will say is that it was life-changing for me. I saw just how much two world-class opera performers at the top of their game can bring to an all too familiar work.

      It certainly opened the eyes of many opera critics. Because Puccini was the commercial backstop of every opera company he had become devalued as a composer. To serious opera buffs his stock was similar to the Sixties intelligentsia’s view of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Every time an opera house needed bums on seats they wheeled out a tired old production of La Bohème, Tosca or Madame Butterfly played by a disinterested orchestra and regarded by the management as a necessary ill to pay for the real stuff of opera which unfortunately the ignorant public had no desire to see.

      Everyone has a Tosca story, e.g. the fat soprano who threw herself off the rooftop of the Castel Sant’Angelo only to bounce up over the ramparts from the trampoline stationed beneath. Tosca had been called a “shabby little shocker.” The Oxford Companion to Music (Seventh Edition by Percy Scholes) had this condescending entry – about a third the length of Bartók’s – about Puccini. It speaks volumes.

      The music is essentially Italian in its easyflowing melody … his harmonies just original enough to rouse the attention of the conventional opera goer … he employs not so much his own system harmony as that of his immediate predecessors served up with new condiments.

      Here at last was a production that took the music seriously, gave it first-class production values and proved what a master theatre composer he was. Parenthetically, much as I love Tosca the only other Puccini opera I know well is La Bohème. For some reason, I have never got to grips with Madame Butterfly or Manon Lescaut. In fact my knowledge of opera is not as deep as all that. One of my problems is that I can’t hear the words. It’s worse when they’re unintelligible and supposed to be being sung in English.

      IN FEBRUARY 1964 TWO ex-Westminster boys joined the Swinging London party. Peter Asher and Gordon Waller were both prefects during my early days at school. Gordon had fronted various Elvis-type school acts and had definitely been the school’s hot dude. Little then did I think that only a few years later he would play Pharaoh in the first stage production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

      Peter’s claim to fame was that his sister Jane was Paul McCartney’s girlfriend. This was helpful as far as Peter and Gordon’s debut single was concerned since Paul wrote it. “A World Without Love” went to No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic. It was the first time anyone from a British public school had done such a thing. I thought Westminster needed to commemorate this momentous feat. I booked up to see Headmaster John Carleton who heartily agreed that once again Westminster was ahead of the curve.

      Not only did he give me complete use of the school theatre, but he allowed the whole school a special holiday to see my celebration. My enterprise was much abetted by Desmond Elliott. Whether he or I came up with the abominable title Play the Fool, I can’t remember so I’ll blame him. What I do remember is that the invites were sent out to random key people whose addresses I stole in envelopes that looked like writs. The response was astonishing. Soon people who hadn’t been invited were clamouring for tickets to this happening under the nose of Westminster Abbey.

      There wasn’t much musical content from me, apart from a showstopping bid with my Wes Sands song “Make Believe Love” which completely failed. It was much upstaged by an outfit called Twinkle and the Trekkers, Twinkle being a rather posh girl in a wafty dress who had been drafted in by one of the boys to front his house band. She had written a death motorcycle epic called “Terry” with incisive lyrics like: “He rode into the night / Accelerated his motorbike / I cried to him in fright / Don’t do it, / Don’t do it.” A motorbike was an essential part of the staging but we couldn’t find one. Nonetheless “Terry” went fine. Shortly afterwards Twinkle had a big UK hit with it on Decca Records. I think somewhere along the line Tim Rice had a short association with Twinkle, but I may be misinformed.

      A huge array of lower echelon radio and TV producers turned out to see the first show I had masterminded. So it was as a producer rather than composer that these guys first heard of me. Nothing like this had happened at Westminster before and I was very proud of it. Even masters mouthed “Well done.” I had promoted the show, cast it, found the technicians, found someone to light it, sorted the sound system, chosen the music and created a decent running order out of a ragtag potpourri of bands who ranged from hormonal teenage girl sulkbags to a rough North London mob oddly named Peter and the Wolves who wanted to smash the Merseyside boys. Their songs were pretty dire, but their cover versions had the whole school rocking and Compline (evening prayers) was abandoned in St Faith’s that night. All those episodes of Jack Good’s Oh Boy! had rubbed off on me. Soon, I presumed, someone would take me on as an apprentice at a TV company and I could leave Westminster just like that! It’s nice to dream.

      THE SUMMER TERM WAS when we took A levels. The results of these determined whether you tried for a university. At Westminster there were a series of “closed” places to Oxford and Cambridge, i.e. scholarships and the like which are charitably funded and only open to Westminster boys. I don’t know if this monstrously unfair system applies today, but in my day these “closed” places siphoned off the best Westminster talent. Rarely did a Westminster boy enter the “open” exams that pitted you against all comers.

      My A-level results were appalling. I had only two passes, a D grade in History and E in English; the worst ever result by any Westminster Scholar. My songwriting and producing activities had finally caught up with me. I sat the Christ Church exam along with everyone else, but knew I had no hope of getting a place. I went to the interview like a zombie. Needless to say, I was told to try again next year. Suddenly it hit me. All my friends would be leaving for Oxford and I would be left skulking behind, trapped in a school I was bursting to get out of. Now all my friends seemed to be talking in groups about what would happen when they left. Should they travel round Europe together? What about a trip to New York before Oxford term starts? They were talking about New York, the home of musicals! And they were talking without me. I had blown it big time and it was all my fault.

      There was only one tenuous hope. Talk about Last Gasp Saloon time but I realized that the “open” exam for entrance to all the Oxford colleges took place a fortnight СКАЧАТЬ